In court papers filed shortly before midnight Monday, Brown asks a panel of three federal judges to scrap orders to continue lowering the state prison population, despite a 2011 Supreme Court ruling demanding the reduction in order to improve medical care in the prisons.

The governor on Tuesday declared the "prison emergency ... over in California," calling the once overwhelming prison overcrowding problems a "distant memory."

Brown and state prison officials argue that California has done enough to fix its prisons and bring inmate health care up to legal standards. They warned that keeping the prisons under court control threatens public safety and could cost the state billions of dollars more as it tries to emerge from its most severe budget crisis in recent history.

"Because the state is providing effective health care at current population levels, further court-ordered reductions of the prison population are not needed," state attorneys wrote in Brown's filing.

Because California is still under court order to reduce the system's population to 137.5 percent of its designed-for capacity by mid-2013, Brown also presented a plan describing how the state would comply with that demand if forced to do so. As of two weeks ago, the prisons remained at 149 percent of capacity.

Among the steps the state would take are increasing the percentage of time off for good behavior and participation in rehabilitation programs, expanding work furlough and alternative custody programs, placing more inmates in private prisons and adding new ways to keep inmates in county jails rather than sending them to prisons.

Those ways include keeping felons sentenced to nine months in prison or less in county jail, and expanding the list of crimes eligible for "realignment" sentences served in local jails.

It's those last few provisions that have Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller worried.

"We're trying to do our best with the prisoners that have been and continue to be realigned to our county," he said. "We would hope the governor's plan would not include further increases in the percentages of prisoners we receive."

While Monterey County Jail remains chronically overcrowded — on Monday, the facility designed for 800-plus held 1,090 people — Miller said the expected explosion in inmate population has so far been averted.

"It seems we've been able to moderate the impact of realignment on our inmate population through some creative means," he said.

Those steps have included increasing time off for good behavior from 33 percent to 50 percent; releasing more defendants on their own recognizance before they go to trial; and sending inmates to outside rehabilitation programs.

Those steps have all kept the impact on the local jail population "fairly moderate," Miller said.

"We've kind of run out of creative options," he said. "If we were burdened with more, it would put pressure on our ability to house them."

Plans are under way to add more beds to the jail, but that will only bring official capacity up to the number of inmates the overcrowded jail holds now.

"If we have the 288 (additional) beds that we plan to construct today, that would be about what our population currently is," Miller said.

Besides Brown's proposal to keep more inmates in counties instead of state prisons, another factor leading to the strain on Monterey County's jail population has been local judges' reluctance to use alternative sentences that other counties have embraced since state prisoner realignment went into effect more than a year ago.

The California Chief Probation Officers Association recently reported that Monterey County judges are among the state's most reluctant to issue so-called "split sentences" — jail time followed by rehabilitative programs.

Miller said his office expects jail inmate numbers to rise, although he holds out some hope that expanded programs — such as a treatment-focused day reporting center for probationers — will help.

"We remain cautiously optimistic that evidence-based means of reducing recidivism will have an effect," he said.

Coming aboard in the midst of these challenges is a new interim jail chief who replaces retired chief Jeff Budd.

Former Orange County Assistant Sheriff Jay LeFlore came out of retirement to fill the post, and has experience with jail construction and remodeling, Miller said. According to news reports, LeFlore worked with design and construction crews during expansion of the 3,000-inmate Theo Lacy Facility in Orange County.

Meanwhile, activists around the state disagreed with Brown's contention that the prison population has been sufficiently reduced.

"Any suggestion that the over-incarceration crisis in California has been remedied belies reality," said Allen Hopper of the American Civil Liberties Union of California.

"Rather than maintain the status quo, state leaders should support reforms that even the state corrections department admits would reduce the state prison population, like changing sentencing laws regarding low-level drug possession and expanding credits for participating in rehabilitation and educational programs," Hopper said.

He cites a severe shortage of prison psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, despite the addition of 138 mental health crisis beds at a new facility at Salinas Valley State Prison. (The prison is one of two in Soledad; the other is the Correctional Training Facility.)

Bien wrote in a court filing that "shortages of critical mental health staff, including psychiatrists, worsened in 2012, with vacancies of psychiatrists increasing to 42 percent, and overall clinical vacancy rates increasing to 35 percent."

He said prison suicides are also on the rise, jumping from seven in 2008 to 17 in 2011.

In addition, prison rights lawyers said there were 43 possibly or definitely preventable inmate deaths in 2011, all of which involved "lapses in care" or "extreme departures" from accepted practices, according to an analysis by Kent Imai, a former Army doctor and medical consultant for the Federal Receiver for California Prison Healthcare Reform.

Among the cases were a young inmate with a "known seizure disorder (who) died after missing five days of medication," Imai wrote. The man was placed in a housing unit where the call system didn't work, the report said.

Even among the 345 "non-preventable deaths" in 2011, there were 154 serious lapses in medical care, Imai reported.